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ASRock ALiveNF7G-HDReady

07-29-2007, 02:50 PM

Phoronix: ASRock ALiveNF7G-HDReady

It has been a while since we last reviewed an ASRock motherboard, but this budget manufacturer has kept churning out new and more innovative products. The ASRock motherboard we have our hands on for this Linux and Solaris review is the ALiveNF7G-HDready, which combines NVIDIA's GeForce 7050 and nForce 630a MCP with a wealth of integrated extras such as IEEE-1394a Firewire to offer a rather good package for its low price. This motherboard is also capable of handling 720p H.264 video playback with low CPU Utilization and HDCP decoding through supported software.

Comment

Thanks for the update. This type of board is more likely to be bought by non gamers, some of whom could be interested in keeping it running cooler and quieter. Since there's headroom to be used, you can overclock at default voltage, or undervolt at default speed, whichever makes more sense. But some boards' bios only allow overvolting.

Comment

full ack!
i plan to use this board in my upcoming desktop-computer which i'd like also to use as a small web/file-server which implies that it'll run a lot so i'm interested in an energy-efficient solution to keep the costs for electricity as low as possible.

maybe someone owning this board could post how low the bios allows one to go with the vcore-voltage?

Comment

The review for this motherboard failed to mention that the ethernet port won't work unless you re-compile the kernel with the latest forcedeth.c driver from NVidia (available at http://www.nvidia.com/object/linux_nforce_1.23.html). I would not have bought this motherboard if I had known it was going to require so much work to get it to connect to the Internet! I tried several distros (including Kubuntu Feisty, Sidux, and Knoppix), and none of them supported the ethernet chipset out of the box.

Comment

Additional information: the ethernet port can be made to work using the default forcedeth driver (at least in Kubuntu Feisty; will try others shortly), although the device still does not appear as /dev/eth0 and shows up as an unknown device using lspci. What I did: after making sure that the forcedeth driver was loaded and that my network settings were correct, I rebooted, and I now have internet access, although by all rights, I probably shouldn't.